Wildfires in California's fabled Sierra Nevada mountain range are increasingly burning high-elevation forests, which historically have seldom burned, reports a team of researchers led by the John Muir Institute of the Environment ...

Something strange started happening in cities and towns in Ontario and across the northeastern United States in the summer of 1950. In the middle of the day, it started to get dark—so dark, in fact, that cities like Toronto ...

Southeast Asian nations meeting Tuesday to discuss the problem of haze that shrouds the region's skies every year made little progress, as the number of smog-belching forest fires was on the rise in Indonesia.

Fire

Fire is the rapid oxidation of a combustible material releasing heat, light, and various reaction products such as carbon dioxide and water. If hot enough, the gases may become ionized to produce plasma. Depending on the substances alight, and any impurities outside, the color of the flame and the fire's intensity might vary. Fire in its most common form can result in conflagration, which has the potential to cause physical damage through burning.